Using plan branches

Activating plan branching

When you activate plan branching, Bamboo automatically creates plan branches whenever the source repo is branched. You can also create a plan branch manually.

You can override the master plan's configuration in a branch plan, if required.

To see a list of branches for a plan, click on the branch icon beside a plan name on the All Plans tab of the dashboard. Select a branch name from the list to go directly to the summary page for that branch plan.

Screenshot: The Plan Summary page for a branch, showing the 'branches' menu.

Auto branching

You can use auto branching for Git, Mercurial and Subversion repositories. For other repository types, you can use manual branching.

To have Bamboo automatically manage plan branches whenever the repo branches:

1. Go to the Branches tab in the configuration pages for the plan you wish to branch.
2. Check Create plan branches for branches detected in the repository.
3. Enter a regular expression to match the repository branch names for which plan branches will be created. An example is: (branch1|branch2|branch3)/.* See the Java documentation on regular expressions.

4. Make the following optional settings as required. These will be applied to all branch plans created from this plan configuration, although they can be overridden in those branch plans, if required.

   Merging	Not available for Subversion. Check Branch merging enabled, and complete either the 'Branch updater' or 'Gatekeeper' sections, as described below.
   JIRA feature branches	Check Create remote links from JIRA issues... to have the plan branch automatically linked, using an issue key in the branch name. Described below.
   Notifications	Described below.
   Plan branch cleanup	Edit the Remove after value (days), after which branches are automatically deleted, if no commits have been made to the VCS branch in that period. A value of zero prevents plans from being deleted.
   Branches Root	Only available for plans that use a Subversion source repository. Bamboo assumes that your Subversion repository structure follows the convention for branches, and automatically calculates the branch root URL. For example, for the fastBuild repo with this URL: https://svn.mycompany.com/svn/fastBuild/trunk, Bamboo will expect that branches will be created at this location: https://svn.mycompany.com/svn/fastBuild/branches. If your Subversion repository structure follows a different convention, you can specify where repository branches will be created by selecting Change branch root URL.

5. Click Save.

Branch detection

Once plan branching is enabled, Bamboo will check for a new branch every 300 seconds, by default. You can customize the branch detection interval as follows:

1. Click the  icon in the Bamboo header and choose Overview.
2. Click General configuration in the left navigation panel (under 'System').
3. Enter a new value (in seconds) for Branch detection interval.
4. Click Save.

Manual branching

Use manual branching for all supported repository types. You may want to consider using auto branching for Git, Mercurial and Subversion repositories.

To manually create a branch of a plan:

1. Go to the Branches tab in the configuration pages for the plan you wish to branch.
2. Click Create Branch. Bamboo automatically checks for branches in the specified repository for the plan.
3. Select from the available VCS branches, then click Create.
4. You can override the default settings for the branch, such as the source repository used, if you wish.

Integrating branches with JIRA

When a developer begins working on a feature described in a JIRA issue, they use Git or Mercurial to branch the repository. If they use the issue key as part of the VCS branch name, Bamboo will detect the issue key and automatically link the new branch to the issue:

• The JIRA issue key needs to be in the name of the branch – 'jb-BDEV-790' and 'BDEV-769 1' are valid forms.
• The link shows up right under the breadcrumb on the Build Result Summary for the plan branch, and on the JIRA issue too.

To use JIRA Feature Branching, Bamboo needs an application link to the JIRA server.

Branch notifications

You can get build notifications from branch plans just as you do for master plans.

To specify how notifications are sent by all branches created from a plan, go to the Branches tab for the plan's configuration and choose one of the following options:

• Notify committers and people who have favourited this branch.
• Use the plan's notification settings.
• Notifications should not be sent for this branch.

You can override how notifications are sent from a particular branch plan, if necessary, by going to the Notifications tab on the Plan Branch configuration.

See Configuring notifications for a plan and its jobs for information about plan notifications.

Branch dependencies

You can use build dependencies for plan branches in a similar way to that for plans: a branch plan is triggered only when another branch plan has been successfully built. This can be used to ensure that breaking source code changes associated with one branch plan are detected before they can break the build of a dependent branch plan. Dependencies between master plans are maintained if their branch plans have the same name. See Setting up plan build dependencies for further information about dependencies.

Select Enable dependencies for all branches of this plan, on the Dependencies tab for the plan configuration, if you want plan branches to honour the build dependencies of their respective master plans.

Configuring plan branches

Whether a plan branch is created automatically or manually, the master plan maintains the structure and configuration of it's branch plans. However, you can go to the configuration pages to override the following settings in a branch plan: